Tutorial mini: WordPress Post Types and Taxonomies

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

WordPress Post Types and Taxonomies – Integrating Post Types

Integrating post types is simply a matter of including the register_post_type function. Once you have included this in your functions.php file, your nav menu should go from something like this:

Original WordPress Navigation

to this:

WordPress Navigation with Custom Post Type

In order to create custom post types, open your template’s functions.phpfile in an editor, and place the following function within the file:


function create_post_type() {
        register_post_type( 'mysite_reviews',
                array(
                        'labels' =&gt; array(
                                'name' =&gt; __( 'Reviews' ),
                                'singular_name' =&gt; __( 'Review' )
                        ),
                'public' =&gt; true,
        'menu_position' =&gt; 5,
        'rewrite' =&gt; array('slug' =&gt; 'reviews')
                )
        );
}

add_action( 'init', 'create_post_type' );

Broken down, this adds the function create_post_type, and registers the post type mysite_reviews.


add_action( 'init', 'create_post_type' );
function create_post_type() {
        register_post_type( 'mysite_reviews',

You may wonder why I’ve named the post_type mysite_reviews, and not just reviews. I made the name more conspicuous in order to make sure that my post type wouldn’t interfere with custom post type names from other plugins or themes.

Here is a summary of the important post type parameters I’ve set above:

labels – WordPress allows us to label everything from the post type’s name to the label for adding new posts. A complete list can be found here. In the above function, I labeled the name of the post type and its singular name.

public – If set to true

menu_position – I set this to 5, which will place the post type directly under “Posts”. The other placements are as follows: null (below Comments), 0 (below Media), 20 (below Pages), 60 (below first separator) and 100 (below second separator)

rewrite – So that our actual term “mysite_reviews” doesn’t get put in the URL, we set the slug to “reviews” which will be much better in the long run for our visitors, links, and SEO.